UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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Chapter
Twenty-Two

Joshua hunched over his cup of coffee—the last remains of the pot he’d snuck inside to make several hours after his family had gone to bed. Neither of us felt comfortable falling asleep tonight, but unlike me, Joshua didn’t have the luxury of almost-permanent sleeplessness. He would have to make do with caffeine.

“No, Amelia,” he mumbled into his cup and then rubbed his tired eyes. He shook his head as adamantly as one could at four thirty in the morning. “I still think it’s a terrible idea.”

“Do you have a better one?” I snapped. I immediately regretted my tone, and I smoothed my hand down his arm in apology. “Sorry, Joshua, really. But I just don’t see any other options.”

If I spoke honestly, it seemed we were out of options in a lot of ways.

For starters, instead of lying curled up together on Joshua’s bed, we sat huddled on the bottom steps of the gazebo in the backyard. After Eli disappeared, Joshua and I had tried to enter his house, but something kept me from doing so every time I’d tried. A quick check of the ground revealed our culprit: a layer of chalky gray dust now bordered all the entrances into the Mayhew house, probably sprinkled there today by Ruth. The chalk barred my entry like some invisible wall; even when Joshua swept away the chalk, the magical barrier remained intact. As if I needed another reminder of the painful—and maybe permanent—exorcism that awaited me tonight.

Unfortunately, Eli currently took precedent over my Ruth problem since I didn’t doubt the sincerity of his threats against Joshua. I’d explained everything to Joshua: Eli’s mad need to own me, his staunch insistence that I was fated to turn evil and serve him, even his role in Joshua’s near-death.

Joshua, however, remained undeterred.

“How can meeting that guy—alone, in a graveyard—be our only option?” he demanded. “And how can you even think about giving in to what he wants?”

“How can I not?” I groaned as I flopped sideways onto the gazebo steps. I stared at Joshua, who had propped himself against a wooden post. “You know Eli’s not going to leave us alone until I talk to him again.”

“So? Just let him try and mess with us.”

“Joshua, that’s very brave of you and all, but could we please avoid pissing off a dead guy who can disappear at will? God knows what else he’s capable of.”

Joshua snorted. “Oh, disappearing. Real spooky.”

But even through Joshua’s sarcasm, I could hear a subtle hint of uncertainty. I pressed the point.

“Yeah, disappearing. At will. Something I can’t do yet. And I don’t think he was lying when he said he had even more tricks up his sleeve.”

Suddenly, Joshua was alert. He lurched forward and grabbed my hips, pulling me closer to him. When our knees almost touched, he stopped pulling but left his hands clasped around my waist.

“Exactly, Amelia!” he cried. “Don’t you see? That’s why you can’t go there by yourself to meet him. We have no idea what he’s going to be able to do to you. Like you said: even my grandmother and her friends haven’t been able to stop him from hurting people. So what makes you think you’d be safe?”

Joshua’s concern touched me, far more than I let him see. But no matter how Joshua felt, no matter that today was the deadline Ruth had set for my exorcism, I had to end this skirmish with Eli; I had to clear him from Joshua’s life before Joshua got hurt. I kept my expression rigid, firm.

“I’m not going to argue about this anymore. I’m going to the graveyard. That’s that.”

Joshua sighed heavily and closed his eyes.

“Amelia, Amelia, you are a stubborn girl.” He sighed once more. “If you’re going, then you’re not going alone.”

I opened my eyes and pulled myself from his arms. Joshua fell forward, too tired to react in time to my movement. He righted himself and gave me a baleful stare. I ignored him and shook my head forcefully.

“Absolutely not,” I said. “You’re not coming with me. We’ve already covered this, Joshua.”

“But—”

“But no,” I interrupted him. “I can’t give in on this one, Joshua, I’m sorry. Eli wants me. Just me. He wants to love me, or own me, or whatever . . . but I don’t think he’d actually hurt me. At least, not in a permanent way. He wouldn’t hesitate to hurt you, though, if it meant getting to me. So you can’t be there. Period.”

“You’re right,” Joshua muttered. “I know you’re right.” He frowned and stared down at his lap.

His apparent surrender surprised me, and it momentarily caught me off guard. But when Joshua looked back up at me, I could see that he wasn’t surrendering. Not at all. His eyes showed nothing but absolute resolve.

“You are right, Amelia,” he repeated with an air of finality. “Which is why I’m going to do my damnedest to make sure neither of us goes to see that guy.”

Joshua clasped his hands back around my waist. I couldn’t feel his arms, but I could see them tighten around me. His grip on me, and his hard gaze, made his point perfectly clear: he would do anything humanly possible to keep me with him, and away from that graveyard.

So I would have to resort to inhuman tactics.

I gave him a soft smile. “Can you promise me something?” I asked quietly.

“Not if it has anything to do with you trying to go out there.”

I shook my head, still smiling. “Joshua, please. Just listen. I need you to make me a promise. If you don’t see me again, I need you to promise you won’t come looking for me, okay?”

“Amelia, what are you—,” he began in a panicked voice, but I cut him off with a firm kiss.

This kiss was entirely different from our first two. Now I kissed him roughly, moving my lips against his with a force that belied my desperation. Joshua was so surprised by this attack, he couldn’t help but kiss me back. And, of course, his reaction just made me kiss him more fiercely.

Then, without warning, I jerked away and shut my eyes tight. Before Joshua could pull me back to him, I concentrated on difficult thoughts.

Thoughts of my mother, lonely and alone inside her worn little home. Thoughts of my father’s face—a face I may never see again, in any of the afterworlds. And thoughts of Joshua. Not the happy thoughts of the last few days but thoughts of forever, as only my kind could understand it. Forever, spent without him.

On top of all these sad thoughts, I forced an overlay of one image: that of the graveyard in which I awoke after each of my nightmares. I squeezed my eyes tighter, burning the image onto the backs of my eyelids.

And suddenly, I couldn’t feel the pressure of Joshua’s arms around me.

My eyes shot open.

At first I couldn’t feel or see anything. Everything was numb, and black. Then, painfully, my eyes began to adjust to their new surroundings.

Wherever I now sat, it wasn’t entirely black, as I’d originally thought. This new place was just very, very dark.

A bird called out somewhere to my right, and my head jerked toward the noise. The movement brought into view dark shapes amassed all around me. As my eyes adjusted more, I could just make out the structure of the shapes. The tall ones were trees, drooping toward the ground. The shorter ones were less uniform: some of them, although wide at the base, narrowed into obelisks at the top; some formed squat half circles above a field of grass. Whatever their form, all of these shorter shapes were unquestionably gravestones.

I’d done it.

I’d willed myself into the graveyard a few hours before dawn.

A sharp, bitterly cold wind slammed into me, whipping against my cheeks and whirling my hair up in the air. When the wind died down, a dry voice slithered out from the darkness.

“You’re early, Amelia Ashley.”

“Well,” I said shakily, trying my best to sound calm as I pushed myself upright. “What can I say? I’m a punctual girl.” Then I paused and frowned. “Wait . . . you just said my last name, didn’t you?”

Eli stepped out from the shadow of a tree, coming into dim view.

“Quite right, Amelia,” he said. “How do I know your last name? And how do I know this is the graveyard where you wake up after your accidental materializations?”

I felt my stomach drop.

In my haste to get this over with, and to spare Joshua in the process, I hadn’t even considered that detail. Your graveyard, Eli had said. He shouldn’t have known about my graveyard. Unless . . . .

“You’ve been lying to me again, haven’t you? You know more about my life than you let on.”

“Only a little bit.”

“How much is a little bit?” I demanded.

“Well, why don’t you turn around and look at the gravestone you’re practically lying on? That should provide some explanation.”

I didn’t want to look away from Eli’s face. I didn’t want to lose sight of him in the great likelihood that he had another nasty surprise planned for me. Yet my head seemed compelled by other forces. It turned slowly until I faced the grass and dirt just behind me.

I’d never wanted to stay in this graveyard long enough to study its headstones or search for my own grave. I merely assumed I’d been buried here, and the assumption was reason enough for me to run away from this place each time I entered it.

I also assumed that, should I stumble upon my grave, I would likely find it overgrown. I don’t know why I’d made this assumption. But in the long years since my death, I’d forgotten my parents and their love for me. To my depressed, lonely mind, it only made sense that whoever I left behind wouldn’t remember me or my grave.

The little, well-tended patch of earth I now faced proved this last assumption wrong. And despite that fact—despite the obvious love that went into the grave’s care—its very appearance broke my heart into a million pieces.

Behind me, a concrete slab lay flush to the ground. Concrete, I suppose, because my parents couldn’t have afforded much else. Someone had carefully cleared away the grass from the concrete slab and wiped it clean of dead leaves. A ceramic pot filled with silk daisies sat at the base of the stone.

Simple block letters were imprinted on the stone’s surface. Apart from the epitaph, the letters read much like my senior yearbook inscription:

AMELIA ELIZABETH ASHLEY
APRIL 30, 1981—April 30, 1999
BELOVED DAUGHTER FOREVER

Seeing those words, all I could imagine was my father’s face as he chose that concrete stone at the funeral parlor and my mother’s hands as they gathered up those daisies in the fabric store.

My dead and unbeating heart could still ache with grief, so it seemed. Fiercely so. I wiped at the one tear that had coursed its way down my cheek and turned back around to stare up at Eli. Even his unpleasant face would be better to look at than the last gifts my parents had left me.

Meeting my eyes, Eli nodded grimly. “So, now you see why I know your last name, Amelia Ashley.”

“How did you find this?” I asked.

“I was here myself only a month ago, wandering a bit and thinking. When, lo and behold, who did I see appear out of thin air? My little Amelia, choking and gasping right on top of that grave. You must have materialized here without meaning to. By doing so you solved a great mystery: where does Amelia go when she disappears? After answering that riddle for me, you ran away, not seeing or sensing me.”

I nodded absently, processing this information. So, Eli had watched me wake up from a nightmare. That explained how he knew about “my” graveyard and how he’d discovered my last name. Yet, another question remained.

“Why were you here in the first place, Eli?”

Eli frowned heavily. “It may surprise you to know, Amelia, that I find this place as distasteful as you do. But, just like you, I return to it occasionally, for reasons even I don’t fully understand.”

My eyebrows knit together in an unspoken question. In answer, Eli held out his hand.

“Come on. I’ll show you.”

I stared warily at his outstretched hand. Eli sighed impatiently and waggled his fingers at me.

“It’s not a snake, Amelia. It won’t hurt you.”

“No, but you might.”

Eli sighed again and pulled back his hand. “Fine. Would you at least follow me, then?”

I thought about the request for a moment, then rose to my feet, trying to repress the thought that I currently stood on my own grave. And that I actually walked across my own grave as I followed Eli deeper into the cemetery.

Eli strode slowly through the grass for a while until he came to a weathered headstone. He stopped at the foot of the grave and, expressionless, stared at it.

“This,” he said, gesturing to the stone. “This is why I come here.”

The writing on the marker was plain and nondescript, perhaps intentionally so. It merely read:

ELI ROWLAND
1956—JULY 11, 1975
CLIMBING THE STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN

“Yikes,” I murmured.

Eli snorted in agreement. “My band mates obviously couldn’t remember my birthday. I don’t even think they contacted my family about my death. But the Led Zeppelin inscription’s a nice touch, isn’t it?”

“Heartfelt.” I turned back to him. “So . . . this means we’re buried in the same cemetery?”

He nodded, and then the tiniest smile crept over his features. When he spoke again, his tone had lost some of its bitter edge. “More proof that we’re fated to be together, don’t you think?”

“If that were the case, Eli, I’d have a whole graveyard full of choices, wouldn’t I?”

Eli chuckled darkly but then turned his eyes back to his headstone without further comment. He didn’t even watch me when I walked away from him.

I picked my way through the weeds, back to the relatively manicured area in which my own concrete slab lay. Once there, I knelt at the foot of my grave and pressed my hands to the low grass. It seemed firm enough beneath my hands. This plot of earth was no dream, no nightmare.

I had an instant, sickening thought: what lay in the grave now, just six feet below my fingertips? I didn’t know, but I could guess. An unbidden picture flashed into my mind, and I gagged. I turned my face to my shoulder so I wouldn’t have to stare at this suddenly repulsive stretch of grass.

Unfortunately, I realized only too late that I shouldn’t have turned. In doing so, I brought another headstone into my line of sight: the one right next to mine.

The early-morning sun had crested the horizon, and it now threw its soft pink rays from behind the neighboring headstone. The rays were almost strong enough to shadow the headstone and obscure its letters. Almost, but not quite.

On a tall stone, only slightly fancier than mine, the following letters glared out at me:

TODD ALLEN ASHLEY
JUNE 5, 1960—MARCH 29, 2006
WE’LL MEET AGAIN

The breath simply whooshed out of my lungs. As I sat there trying to reclaim it—hands pressed to the ground, eyes fixated on my father’s epitaph—the faint tunes of a song echoed in my ears. I closed my eyes and imagined the scene that had always seemed to go along with it.

My father and mother, on one of their happier days. One of those days when money worries or job insecurities didn’t bother them as much, and they each remembered the other’s presence. On those days my father would barge into our tiny kitchen and scoop my mother into his arms. It wouldn’t matter if she was covered in flour from making our dinner or suds from the dishes. She would wrap her arms around his neck and lay her head upon his shoulder while he crooned an old tune to her, one that promised they’d meet again, sometime, someplace.

The song was so loud in my head, I didn’t hear Eli walk up behind me.

“You don’t have to be sad about your death anymore, Amelia.” Eli’s voice cut off the song just at its crescendo. “I’m here to share it with you,” he added, placing one hand upon my shoulder.

I brushed Eli’s hand away, perhaps with unnecessary force. “I’m not sad about my death, Eli. I’m sad about his.” I pointed to my father’s grave, my finger jutting out in a rigid accusation, as if to blame the grave itself for my misery.

“Oh. And who is this?”

“My father,” I whispered.

“This stone?” Eli leaned over me to read the stone. “Todd Ashley? This is your father?”

“Y-yes.”

The word broke apart as I spoke it. I pressed one hand to my lips in an effort to hold back the torrent, but it was too late. My enormous, gasping sobs ripped through the dawn air, wrenching out of me not only my breath but also a great flood of tears.

I sank, then, at the foot of my father’s grave. I left my hands on the grass and lay my head upon them. I let my tears fall from my face, onto my hands and then onto the ground.

“You’re . . . crying,” Eli breathed in wonder.

“Yes,” I moaned, but then barked out a bizarre little laugh. I pushed myself back up into a seated position, wiping ineffectually at my cheeks and my chin. “I’ve been known to do that from time to time.”

Eli grabbed my waist, and, before I realized what was happening, he pulled me to my feet and whirled me around to face him.

“You’ll never have to cry again. Not while you’re with me.”

His fingers dug into the fabric of my dress. With one huge breath—for courage, perhaps—he wrenched me to him and pressed his lips to mine.

His mouth muffled my cry of protest. I shoved hard against his chest, but my struggles only made him pull me tighter.

As the kiss continued, I cried out again, but not in protest. This time, I did so in fear.

Because, while Eli kept his mouth crushed to mine, I felt a piercing sensation there, like something had ripped the delicate skin of my lower lip apart. The corners of my eyes prickled from the pain.

When Eli loosened his grip in an attempt to cup my cheek, I was finally able to break free. As I pushed myself out of his arms, I had to retreat several steps back onto my own grave. Even without the pressure of Eli’s mouth to mine, my bottom lip still throbbed painfully, rhythmically. My tongue darted to the tender spot on my lips and, inexplicably, I tasted copper.

“What did you just do to me?” I gasped, bringing my fingers to my lips but not yet touching them.

Eli had the decency, at least, to look confused. “I’m pretty sure I kissed you, Amelia.”

I dragged the back of my hand across my mouth and then looked down at it. There, smeared across the skin of my hand, was a streak of something bright red.

Blood.

“Y-your teeth,” I stuttered. “I think they cut me. I . . . I’m bleeding.”

Eli shook his head, uncomprehending. “No. No, that’s not possible.”

“Oh, it isn’t?” I said, wiping again at my mouth where I could still feel a hot swell of blood. “Then what’s this on my lips?”

“I don’t know. But whatever it is, you’re wrong,” Eli protested. “I wouldn’t hurt you, Amelia. Not like that. Besides, I couldn’t if I tried—we’re both dead.”

“It doesn’t matter.” My voice rose to a near shout. “You won’t be kissing me again anyway.”

“Oh, I think I will, Amelia. We’re fated.”

“Quit saying that,” I hissed.

“I’ll say whatever I want to you. You’re fated to serve me, remember?”

I laughed and shook my head. “Oh, I remember, Eli. And thanks for reminding me: I should have known better than to trust you, even for a second.”

Eli’s mouth twisted as if he’d bitten into something sour. “And who do you trust, Amelia Ashley? That boy? That living boy?”

I thrust back my shoulders. “That’s none of your business, Eli Rowland.”

His scowl deepened into a disdainful smile. “Exactly what do you hope to do with him? Live a long and happy life?”

“I’ll do whatever I want with him,” I shouted, but Eli merely laughed at me. The cruel sound crawled over my skin.

“You’re missing one very important detail, Amelia,” he said. “You can’t share your future with that boy, because there is no future for you. He’ll age, but you’ll stay the same, forever, dead—unchanging. Futureless.”

“I don’t have to stay here and listen to this,” I spat. “And I’m not going to.”

I spun on my heels to leave, to go anywhere but here, and fast. Before I could run away, though, Eli grabbed one of my wrists and whirled me back around to face him.

Immediately, I became aware of a rough burning upon my wrist at the place where Eli’s fingers gripped me. I looked down at my arm and gasped. Just beneath Eli’s fingers, pale pink streaks appeared on my skin: abrasions, caused by his too-tight grip.

As Eli had said, it wasn’t possible. Yet as I struggled, the marks beneath his fingers grew brighter, more irritated.

“Eli, my arm!” I looked back up at him in panic. Eli, however, didn’t seem to hear me. His eyes, bright and frenzied, bored into mine. I tried in vain to yank my wrist from his grip while I clawed at his fingers with my free hand.

“Stop it!” I shrieked. “You’re hurting me!”

Eli ignored my demand and tugged me closer.

“But maybe I’m forgetting something too, Amelia. After all, isn’t your death one of the reasons you came to see me? You did want to know about your death, didn’t you?” That malicious smile changed into something darker, something wilder. “Well, honey, let me fulfill your wish.”

“No! Let me go,” I cried out just as I lost the tug-of-war with my arm. Eli finally pulled me to him, his face only a few inches from mine.

“Too late, Amelia. Too late.”

“Please,” I gasped. I couldn’t quite catch my breath, and the bones in my wrist strained under his grip.

“Don’t beg. It’s unbecoming,” Eli whispered. Then he jerked me even closer to him, pressing his body to mine. “Now, I’m going to tell you something very important and then I’ve got to get to my second appointment today. I don’t have much time, so listen carefully: you didn’t fall off that bridge.”

“No,” I moaned. “I fell. I know I fell. I didn’t jump.”

“Shut up,” Eli commanded. “You didn’t fall. And you didn’t jump, either.”

“W-what?” I shook my head, unable to think clearly, unable to understand.

Eli leaned in until his cold lips brushed my earlobe. Softly, almost too softly for me to hear, he whispered, “You were pushed.”

Without warning, Eli let go of my arm.

I hadn’t stopped struggling and so I flew backward from the momentum. I fell toward the ground, staring wildly up at Eli’s twisted face.

The last thing I heard, before my vision went black, was the loud crack of my head against my own tombstone.